When it was time to leave, my father and stepmother got into their own car to follow us. I climbed into the back of the van like I always did and buckled into the seat, pilot-like, behind my mother. I forced myself to take in every smell and sight and movement of the van as we wound our way up to the clinic. I memorized the angle of the sun through the tint in the windows, the sounds of the construction sites we always passed. I knew that in a few years I would remember the apartment buildings going up and wonder about the people living inside of them. They wouldn’t know that I’d driven by ten times, seeing the jackhammers and steel beams, on my way to get a second chance at life. Strange thoughts come to mind when you’re in the midst of a life-changing experience. When you know you’re inside of one, you don’t want to take any moment of it for granted.
I will always remember the sway of the vehicle as it turned onto the curving Colorow Way toward the small parking lot filled with the vehicles of patients receiving ECT there. I will always remember the sound of the sliding door as I pulled it open to step out into the sun and feel it on my face, the buzz of a nearby generator greeting us. These details were so distinct to me, the same way your voice echoes when you reach the summit of a hike and yell an exclamation of victory.
Every time we walked toward the doors of the clinic, I would see our reflections in the full-length glass. That day I laughed, noting that I had gotten progressively cleaner and more fashionable with each passing treatment. I had showered and put on my favorite pair of jeans, a pair with a small hole on the right knee and a giant, gaping hole on the left. My father probably wondered why I was dressed so sloppily for something I had told him was so important to me, but he would never understand the significance of these jeans. How I had avoided wearing them for over eighteen months because they just didn’t fit anymore, and what that feeling did to a woman who had been terrorized by the thought of food and eating throughout high school and college. I watched my left knee poke through the ragged hole with every step I took toward that door. They were the perfect item to wear to this important something.
All four of my parents took seats in the waiting room as I checked in and made small talk with Greg. Lauren once again said something nice about what I was wearing. Greg told me they were running slightly behind, not too far, but we’d need to wait at least twenty minutes. I glanced around the room, which was relatively full for that time of day. When I saw the faces of the other patients and those who had accompanied them, I thought, Good. I’m glad we have to wait. My dad will have to sit here and be confronted with the reality of mental health and the toll it takes on people’s lives.
I’m sure that, for the first five treatments, if a stranger in that waiting room had looked at my face and into my hollow eyes, I would have looked like a corpse. You can’t cover up a sincere desire to be dead with foundation or mascara or even a hoodie. And if someone who didn’t really believe in the idea of depression had been sitting in that room, they’d have seen the looks on the faces of my mother and stepfather as well. It would have told a story of desperation and anguish, eighteen months of agony etched into three faces. I’d seen similar expressions on patients’ faces while I waited. There were some in the room just then. Right there next to my father and stepmother, who were avoiding eye contact with anyone.
I took the seat next to my mother and leaned over to whisper, “We have to wait twenty minutes before I go get the needle in my arm. I’m kind of hoping for more if an unexpected patient shows up for the day.” She chuckled under her breath, knowing exactly what I was getting at.
The television in the room was tuned to HGTV as it always was. All five of us watched a show about granite countertops.
None of us really said a word to each other. Usually we’d be discussing something that was going on in the family. But since so much of what was going on in the family was depression and we were sitting right there in the waiting room, with depression, despair, and hopelessness on the faces of multiple people around us, we all politely stared at the television. Finally they called for me to get the needle put into my arm. I returned about twenty minutes later. I nodded at my mother to indicate that they’d had to try more than twice to get the needle into a vein, and then I showed the bruises to my father.
“Whoa, Feather!” he bellowed as he leaned back to take it all in. He tilted his head so that he was seeing through the right part of his glasses and grabbed the arm where the needle was taped down to my forearm. “That has got to hurt. Who have you been fighting?” he laughed.
“These needles are not like normal needles,” I explained. “They’re bigger, more unwieldy. All the phlebotomists are getting used to them and I am the dummy they are using as practice.”
“Can’t they practice on a real dummy?” asked my stepmother.
“Well, I suppose they could if a real dummy had veins pumping blood,” I said. “It’s painful, but this really is the most uncomfortable part of the whole thing. So I can’t really complain, not in the context of all that’s happened.”
Just then a nurse poked her head around the door and asked if we were ready. Most of the waiting room had cleared out by that point. Usually it was empty, and I wondered that day what those who were left were waiting for: Results? Paperwork? Relief?
I accompanied half of the state of Tennessee into the room where my gurney awaited me. Following all protocol, I confirmed my name and date of birth and gladly accepted the warm blanket a nurse handed to me before sitting down on the thin mattress. I looked over to see that my father and stepmother were sitting against the wall directly opposite me, and my mother and stepfather had taken places against the wall adjacent, to my left. As I reclined and swung my feet up on the mattress, I glanced at my father, who had at that point crossed his arms over his chest. My stepmother sat forward at the edge of her seat. At one point my stepmother started asking my mother questions, but because the team was assembling the vials and wires and paperwork, I didn’t catch any of their conversation.
The procedure had become so rote at this point that I didn’t try to resist the anesthesia. I knew it would take me away, that I had no power over it. All I remember is seeing the vial of propofol, that giant tube of milky-white fluid, and the tender look on my mother’s face as I faded into nothingness. Yes, my heart was still beating, but my mother said that she took my stepmother over to the monitor to show her the abyss where my brain activity had been flattened. Friends would ask me if I ever saw anything—perhaps a light, or a tunnel, or any sort of dreamlike sensation—and my answer was always no. I saw nothing. There was black nothingness down there. I never felt them shove a giant breathing tube down my throat, heaving my body up and off the gurney in order to get it in at the right angle fast enough, which showed the depths of that nothingness.
I blinked, and in my blurry vision I could make out the glasses on my father’s face as he sat next to me in the recovery room. Years of practiced repression enabled me to remain silent. I didn’t say a word in my drunken state, and instead tried desperately to focus my eyes. My mother stood next to a nurse near the small refrigerator on the far wall, and my stepmother sat next to my father. She was clutching the neck of her sweater and looked confused. My father was expressionless, which didn’t mean much: it is the resting state of his face. My stepfather sat next to Chris, and when I looked in their direction, my stepfather smiled at me. It was genuine and familiar and so comforting.
“Hey, glad you’re awake,” Chris said as he leaned a little toward my reclining body. I nodded. “Can you tell me your name?”
“I’m Heather B. Armstrong,” I said distinctly. I was trying so hard to perform well for my father.
“Great,” said Chris. “Now, can you tell me what year it is?”
I looked down at the blanket and concentrated on the shape of it as it draped over my feet. “It’s 1979,” I said, thinking my father would be impressed that I was getting all the answers right.
“Do you want to think about that a little more?”
he asked.
Oh God. Had I gotten it wrong? The more I thought about it, the more certain I felt about it.
“But it’s 1979,” I said.
My stepfather smiled again, this time putting his head down. And then it all came back to me. All the times I had come out of anesthesia and spoken the wrong answer. Slowly the numbers began to crawl toward me. It wasn’t 1993, no. I graduated high school that year. How about 1997? Graduated college that year. Then 2004 . . . 2007 . . . 2009 . . . 2012!
“Is it 2012?” I asked.
“Almost there,” Chris said.
I closed my eyes and looked at the whole of my life in an instant. Two thousand and seventeen! God, why was this so hard?
“Two thousand and seventeen. Sorry, I don’t know why this number gets away from me,” I said to Chris. I hated that he had to work to get the right answer out of me.
A nurse I didn’t recognize walked over and handed me a cup of apple juice that I slammed back in one gulp. She asked if I’d like another and I nodded. I wanted so desperately for my father to say something, anything, right then. But he was silent and motionless. Suddenly all I wanted in the world was to crawl into the back seat of that van. He had just witnessed what my mother had been witnessing over and over again. He knew that I wanted him to be there because of her and what this was doing to her. He had just watched my body go lifeless, his baby girl almost dead on a table. His silence said something so different than the silence of my sister.
Within a few minutes I felt steady enough to stand up. I swung my feet over the right side of the gurney so that my stepfather could help me. He made sure that I had my balance before we walked out into the hallway. The five of us, my Southern crew, walked in silence down the corridor toward the entrance. My father still said nothing. When we found ourselves outside in the sunlight on the black pavement of the parking lot, he quickly gave me a hug and told my stepfather to drive safely. That was it. My stepfather slid open the giant side door to the van so that I could climb inside, and he held my arm so that I didn’t trip while doing so. This man. This man who so obviously loved me. This man who had given so much of his time and his life to this treatment, for me. He was giving himself to me. I had spent most of my adulthood supporting the men in my life, and here he was supporting me. And he was asking nothing in return.
As he slid the door shut behind me, I suddenly remembered my sixteenth birthday. My parents bought me a 1979 Datsun 510. It was gray, two-door, and had a stick shift. When they surprised me with it, I felt two very different emotions: (1) Oh my God, they got me a car! and (2) Good lord, it looks like someone stepped on a cockroach and used a poop bag to scrape it off of their shoe. My father drove me to a giant parking lot a few miles up the street to teach me how to drive the thing, because I had no idea what a clutch was.
My father apparently thought that the ability to drive a stick shift is something everyone is born with. We all come out of the womb able to breathe and suckle and shift into third gear. He was aggressive and urgent as he tried to explain how to start the car and shift gears, but I could not stop stalling the car as I tried to move it one inch forward. I couldn’t get the damn thing moving, couldn’t wrap my head around the tactics that made this machine operate. None of it made sense. The more I stalled the car, the more exasperated he became, and the more I stalled the car.
When he drove me home, I went straight to my room and cried into the pillows on my bed. About an hour later my stepfather knocked on my door and asked if he could try to teach me. We’d just take a spin around the neighborhood a few times, he said. He was so gentle about the offer that my desire to be able to drive the car overcame my blinding character flaw of avoiding anything for which I cannot be the valedictorian.
He drove me to the bottom of our street so that I wouldn’t be attempting to shift gears on an incline. When I buckled in and took hold of the steering wheel, he said, “Just ease up on the clutch as you press down on the gas, as slowly as you need to. You’ll feel it.”
“But . . .” I was confused. “My dad said that if you don’t pop your foot off the clutch that it will wear down really fast. And the last thing he wants to do is have to replace a clutch.”
My stepfather laughed. “Yes, over the span of many, many years a clutch might wear out. Easing up on it as you start to drive is perfectly fine.”
I turned the car on, pushed my left foot on the clutch as far down as it would go, then put my foot on the gas. I was holding my breath, and as I eased up on the clutch I could feel the car starting to move, and instinctively I knew when it was safe to ease all the way off of the clutch. The math clicked like the snap of two fingers. Within several hundred yards I was in second gear, within another hundred in third. We drove around the neighborhood for about fifteen minutes, and I didn’t stall the car once. It just made sense. Ease up on the clutch. That was the secret.
My siblings and I have joked about this many times with each other. Both of them had to learn how to drive a stick under the tutelage of our father. They’d had, let’s say, similar experiences to my own, although my brother’s was true to form with his relationship with my father: the worst. Even my mother had to learn from my father, and she’d been so intimidated by his temper that she didn’t learn to drive or get her license until she was well into her twenties. She later told me that as I left the house with him to drive to that giant parking lot, she wanted to reach out and save me. But this was his thing. He was our father and he was going to teach his children how to drive.
As my stepfather pulled out of the parking lot at the clinic, I couldn’t help but think what a metaphor that experience was for what we’d been through over the previous three weeks. He was patient enough to let me ease up on the clutch. I know that if I had stalled the car all those years ago, he wouldn’t have been irritated or angry or judgmental about my having been born helpless. Just like he’d been patient as he sat for hours with me at that clinic. In the waiting room, at the foot of my gurney as I lay there dying, he sat beside me as I came back to life. This man had given his love and patience to me in a way I had never experienced before, not even in a romantic relationship. Here this man was supporting me, and instead of fighting it and protecting the pride I’d built up through years of supporting myself, I was so happy to feel it and breathe it in.
“She talked the whole time,” my mother suddenly exclaimed from the front seat.
“Who?” I asked.
“Your stepmother. She talked the entire time you were down.”
“What did she talk about?”
“She kept asking questions. What was that thing for? Why was that noise going off? What does that line on the monitor mean? Why do they use a wire?”
“What about Dad? Did he say anything while I was down?” I asked, suspecting the answer.
My stepfather started shaking his head. “He sat there with his arms crossed the entire time. Didn’t move. Didn’t say a word.”
“I wanted her to be quiet for just a minute to understand what she was watching,” my mom continued, “to feel what we have felt each time watching you go into the depths. But it was as if they were there watching some ho-hum demonstration of something they didn’t really understand.”
“When they put the breathing tube in, did that startle her? Or Dad?”
“Yeah, that made her jump a bit. She asked why they were being so ‘aggressive’ with you, and I was, like, ‘Because they are taking her brain to zero where she cannot breathe on her own! And she is the valedictorian of getting to zero!’ This was just the complete opposite of what it was like to have your sister and your brother there. Just completely different.”
“Well, we kind of knew this might happen, right?” I asked, looking out the window. I admired the line the mountains cut into the sky.
“I just thought that if they could see it, they’d understand it at least a little bit more. And maybe they do. I’m sure I’ll talk to them over the weekend. There was one thing, though . . .” she trai
led off.
“What?” I asked.
“The way he sat there stroking your forehead before you woke up.”
“Wait, what?” I hadn’t remembered this gesture.
“Your father, he sat next to you after they wheeled you into the recovery room. He stroked your forehead with his thumb for the entire hour it took you to wake up. You don’t remember this?” she asked.
I shook my head. I didn’t remember a single second of it. And I could hardly believe it.
“He didn’t say anything, and it was almost as if he were remembering your childhood. That was the look on his face. Maybe that’s the only way he knew how to respond, to try to comfort you in some way.” Maybe he, too, remembered once lifting me over his shoulders to reach up high into the trees. Maybe that gesture was his way of saying, “I don’t understand any of this, but I’m here.”
Later that night my brother would call my mother to tell her that they’d had my father and stepmother over for dinner. All night long my stepmother expressed concern about what she’d witnessed. What had Heather gotten herself into? And this made my mother sad that she had invited them into our sacred space. It felt instead like an invasion.
I hadn’t been awake to witness the bulk of it. I only sensed the distance when I woke up. I felt like I needed to comfort my mother. We’d hoped it would open their eyes, and we invited them with the best of intentions. But now we knew for sure; we wouldn’t talk to them about our own struggles, and especially not about the struggles of our children. We’d come too far in recognizing the signs and symptoms of depression in our family. None of us should have to deal with someone questioning whether or not our suffering was real.
When we arrived home after that treatment, the kids were inside watching a movie. They get out of school early on Fridays. Leta immediately paused the show, jumped up, and ran to hug me.
The Valedictorian of Being Dead Page 19